Cleve took another hit off the joint. He offered it to me, but I shook my head, pulling out a pack of Marlboro Lights. The smell of Cleve gave me a sudden rush of growing up in lower Alabama, blaring Led Zeppelin and the Stones, and eating handfuls of M amp;Ms under blacklit posters.

“How’d you know he’s dead?”

“Bobby Lee Cook told me a while back. Said Clyde finally done and shot hisself.”

“How’d he know?”

“Bobby Lee Cook, man. He ran Clyde’s label, Bluff City.”

I remembered Loretta mentioning his name.

Everything was wet in the back alley. Trash. Chicken bones. Somewhere in the distance a child screamed, and then starting laughing.

“Goddamn! What the fuck was that?”

I peered beyond a high fence, but could only see endless rows of dilapidated houses occasionally shining with yellow bug lights.

“Man, that scared the cat shit out of me,” Cleve said, with a touch of anger in his voice. He laughed and held on to his chest in a Fred G. Sanford move. “Dude, you said you write about music?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you find me?”

“You know Tad Pierson?”

“Yep.”

“He’s the one.”

“Well, listen,” Cleve said. “Me and the fellas in there are puttin’ out a CD in a few months. You got a card or somethin’?”

I handed him one embossed with the Tulane logo, not bothering to tell him I was a researcher and did little reviewing. “What was he like?”

“Oh, that was like another lifetime ago,” Cleve said and sighed, playing with the loose ends of his long, greasy hair. “I don’t know. Man kept to himself. For most of the time I knew him, he wouldn’t say shit. He’d play cards alone in the back of his tour bus or make these weird little drawings of heaven and hell.